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Want to Find Love? Start With Finding a Person

I’m a natural matchmaker; it’s the Jewish mother in me. While people have come to me to find love, I often start by telling them, “Not so fast.” Love is one of those words that carries so much weight in our culture (there’s a reason Mark Zuckerberg chose to make the button a LIKE button, and not a LOVE button), yet many people can’t give me their own definition of it. So they go into this search, spears forward, trying to mount the summit of Love, thereby blinding themselves to all the people in front of them.

So, when someone comes into my office and says, “Help me find love, Dr. Gluck.” I say, “Define it for me first.” I then help them find a PERSON. But let’s start with the definition.

My definition of love is very simple. You’ve heard me say it on my show on WABC. Love, to me, is simply being emotionally affected by one another’s moods. It’s a certain type of empathy that transcends the every day.

Obviously when a coworker—let’s say Bob— loses a son, you feel immense sadness for him. But that’s still an empathy at an arm’s reach; it’s a gateway empathy that makes you imagine your own children. An empathy of love is when someone’s sorrow or joy directly impacts your own. So let’s say you loved Bob. You would only feel relief from the pain to the extent that Bob himself has felt such relief. Your emotions are always correlative with the other person’s.

If you notice this symptom with someone, you might already have love. Pursue that person. Even if it’s unrequited (and that’s a whole other blog entry entirely: unrequited love). If you don’t have that feeling with someone, and you’d like to, don’t start with trying to find the feeling; start with trying to find the person who might give you that feeling.

One thought on “Want to Find Love? Start With Finding a Person”

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